Third Eye Blind, Dashboard Confessional and the Cultural Shock of Millennial Nostalgia

Children of the '90s will remember this: "Semi-Charmed Life" dominated rock radio, MTV, and VH1 in glorious trifecta for the duration of the summer of 1997, followed by the nearly two-year-long tail of Third Eye Blind’s self-titled debut, six-times platinum with hit after hit on rock radio ("Jumper", "How’s It Gonna Be", "Graduate", "Losing a Whole Year"). The album’s sustained popularity ran into the promo cycle for 1999’s follow up, Blue. This month, the band announced its fifth album, Dopamine, set for release in June. Frontman Stephan Jenkins confirmed it will be the band’s final LP, as it phases out full-length releases.

As those Nineties Kids grew into Angsty Teens in the Oughts, along came Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba, canonized quickly as the patron saint of Vagrant Records and Third-Wave Emo. Then—soon after—the wunderkind of MTV2, which gave Carrabba a large platform from which to sell over a million copies of his entry into the Unplugged franchise and duet with Michael Stipe. By 2003, Carrabba was leading tearful singalongs in large venues nationwide as emo’s ambassador to the mainstream, going gold with that year’s A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar and 2001’s The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most.

Third Eye Blind and Dashboard Confessional—both de facto one-man rock bands who kick off a joint tour this month—is the latest flashpoint of Millennial nostalgia to hit the summer concert circuit. It’s a curious cultural phenomena that belies at least one aspect of the glib headlines and narratives of hot takes about the impatience, entitled attitudes, and short-sightedness of so-called Millennials.

Millennials are surely as nostalgic as any other preceding generation, yet Millennial nostalgia is seemingly more self-reflective, even, and critically thinking than restorative. What they share with previous generations—particularly with Generation X and its pioneering meta observations—is a willingness to reimagine eras in which they never lived. LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy noticed it too. On 2002’s "Losing My Edge", Murphy—a Gen X’er—deadpans about "art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered Eighties."

This assimilation of an era in which you never lived is what Douglas Coupland called "legislated nostalgia" or persuasion through the pop culture of preceding generations to "have memories [you] do not actually possess." Coupland, a seminal Gen-X culture critic, got this published in 1991. Indeed, Millennials and Gen X’ers are hardly the first to have nostalgia legislated onto them, then retool it. But their cultural critics have certainly mused the most about it.

It’s the pace and frequency of the Nostalgia Cycle that’s changed noticeably with Millennials specifically, whose time frame of lived memories for which they’re nostalgic is perpetually shrinking. What Coupland called "ultra-short-term nostalgia" has been shot into Millennial overdrive. Writer-director Noah Baumbach exaggerated the concept in his 1995 dramedy Kicking and Screaming. "I'm nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday," Baumbach muses dryly through the character Max. "I've begun reminiscing events before they even occur." Instant nostalgia. Pre-emptive nostalgia. They happen on social media now, almost literally. And for Millennials, it’s almost blasé. Similar to the crew in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, pop culture is increasingly at the lip of a black hole—in this case, a pop-culture quantum singularity—where the past, present, and future are all taking place simultaneously.

If you’re low-key freaking right now, you’re not alone. The Future Shock of 1970 has become the Present Shock of 2013. It’s why—in the face of a major tour like Third Eye Blind and Dashboard Confessional, capitalizing on the feels and meta ultra-short-term nostalgia of young-professional twenty- and thirtysomething Millennials—it might seem somehow "too soon" to get nostalgic over late-'90s alt-rock or early ’00s emo. But it’s not. Nothing is ever too soon anymore. Even Dashboard Confessional and Third Eye Blind knew that, intrinsically, at their respective peaks.

On his 2003 hit "Hands Down", Carrabba swoons that "This is the best day I can ever remember," slotting his memorable day of falling in love atop a mental list (or listicle?) of his best days ever—right in the midst experiencing the day in question. In 1997, Stephan Jenkins wondered aloud, "Will this song live on long after we do?" breaking through the fourth wall of the Third Eye Blind single "Graduate". Jenkins gets ahead of himself, considering the song’s legacy before the band’s debut is released.

Flash forward to the last few years and it’s a wonder '90s rock bands took even this long to start organizing nostalgia cruises. And that the so-called present Emo Revival—perhaps a byproduct of the genre’s next wave, perhaps a fleeting moment of Millennial nostalgia—got coined as a term only recently.

So why shouldn’t two of their respective emissaries coalesce on a summer tour? To echo James Murphy, the kids are, indeed, coming up from behind. Hell, they’ve already arrived and Third Eye Blind and Dashboard Confessional noticed in time to capitalize on it.